The Abyss Stares Back

We find ourselves on a dark plane with a foreboding castle looming in front of us, with tall dark towers reaching up into the sky and a dark mountain stretching up from behind it. There is a large front door banded with iron that appears to be unguarded, and a column of mist rising up from the left side of the building. We assume that the front door would be worse than it appears to be, so we head for the mist.

It is rising from a tunnel under the building, and we can tell as we get closer that the mist is very hot, though probably survivable. Mads, now a sorcerer because of insanity, travels down the tunnel by making himself immune to the heat. At the bottom, he finds a grate leading out into a bath chamber of some kind, populated by maybe sexy devils? He sends his raven back up the tunnel to tell us what he sees, but decides that he shouldn’t start a fight by himself so he comes back to us. After he describes the scene, Johanna confirms that what he saw was probably succubi that could maybe be reasoned with?

He decides to use his time rewinding watch to return to the bottom of the tunnel and opens up the grate, falling into the spa pool with one of the women who introduces herself as Kallista. She is interested in him and his purpose here, as are her three friends. They offer to open up a door to the upper floors if Mads can entertain them sufficiently. He gives it his best shot, but it turns out that they are most entertained by draining his life force.

We finally hear his screaming from the other end of the tunnel and toboggan our way down there to save him, minimizing our burnination. He doesn’t specifically need saving since the girls are done with him. They offer to party a bit more with the rest of us, but we politely decline and leave for the upper floors.

On the way up, we approach a hallway with screams emanating from it and go in to investigate. There are cells along both sides of the wall with people in them – people with their eyes closed, trapped in what looks like their own nightmares. A larger room at the end has more torture victims and a larger demon. One that is eager to fight us, it seems.

The fight ends with Mads essentially materializing inside of the demon’s chest and exploding outwards. Milosh sort of frees some of the torture victims, although they don’t seem to realize it. Mads imagines that one of the victims is Sebastian having a nightmare about climbing out of his own grave, which makes him regret his life choices even more.

We move on, coming to a small room filled with artwork, where each of us becomes immersed in a nightmare based around our own insecurities. But we defeat art through a combination of cleverness and pure stubbornness!

Next up is a dining room with Johanna’s history with our demonic target carved on the wall. According to the surely trustworthy and complete words on the wall (filtered through Mads’ inner wackiness), Lamoracanthus used to be the land itself, before his brother stole it from him and became the mists. His brother then got a champion in the form of Strahd, so Lamoracanthus got his own champion in Johanna. She needed a Synod, so he brought us. And to get us, he sent the heir, the unmoving one, Milosh.

After some grousing about the implications of all of this, we move on, all a bit crazier for the wear.

The world that we end up in is a post-apocalyptic version of Teufeldorf, in the midst of a monster uprising. The city is ruined and filled with evil. We are immersed in the fiction of the vision, and we know that we are leading three human survivors to a safe house at the old church of Lathander, where Mortimer and Sasha are sheltering people from the monsters.

On the way, we can see the remnants of a tavern on the next street over, where four vampires are attacking a group of survivors. One is already bitten, one is being held by the throat, one is trying to hold them off with a holy symbol and one is cowering near the door. It doesn’t seem to be possible to save all of them without putting our current survivors at risk, so we decide to save the boy near the door and the holy symbol wielder by hurling a knife through the window and opening the throat of one of the others, driving the vampires into a frenzy.

We continue on to the church but find the door ajar when we get there. It seems like the place might be compromised, so we stash the survivors in a nearby silo and then go inside. Mortimer is kneeling by the altar, but when we get to him it is obvious that he is dead, since his head falls almost completely off. Yikes.

At that moment, Sebastian strolls in through the front door flanked by Camille and a vampiric Sasha. He tries to make some small talk but Milosh runs him through with a sword. Fight!

Sebastian has a really bad time and Milosh finally puts him down. Camille cries because Sebastian is dead, and Milosh suddenly sees him as Anneliese. Everyone is sad, but also everyone is also happy that Sebastian is dead. Everyone. I find Sebastian’s signet ring in his dust, which will allow me to silence a battle or a something for a short while.

Back to the hub! And then off into Milosh’s dream, which is of course in a ruined road warden camp. We explore the fort for a while. It appears as if everyone just up and left. Purple smoke drifts across the sky from somewhere. In the building, we run into Abalescu, who has become even more ravager-like in the dream. He says that we will soon be like him, and then purple smoke begins to pour down from the fireplaces, causing us to choke until we escape the building.

But then it gets worse. A horde of ex-wardens pours down the mountain towards the fort, screaming with rage. Fight!

The road wardens work surprisingly well together (and they have crazy flags with them that are even more puissant), but we still defeat them. Back to the hub, where we gain a new level and a galaxy basalt slab leading to Lamoracanthus’s castle.

The plane turns out to not be featureless at all, but it is forbidding and nightmarish. The world seems to have gone entirely gray, but the dark ground seems almost to be moving, and quiet whispers emerge out of the void. As we walk, fissures in the ground start to appear around us, growing larger until we reach a larger solid platform with scenes visible from it – a forest, a ruined city, a black building and clock tower, and an abandoned outpost.

Milosh wants to deal with Johanna’s dream first (and Mads would like to burn any books we find), so we head towards the clock tower and enter the door there. We end up in a library in impeccable order, but with no one in it. Mads and Milosh attempt to cause damage to the place, but it almost instantly heals itself.

At the far side of the room are a door and an easel with a chalkboard on it. The board looks blank to all of us except for Mads, who can see a math puzzle in it. He solves it in record time and opens the door, although Milosh takes the credit since he happened to be standing nearby with a crowbar.

The room beyond is another library chamber, with infinite rows of books stretching into the distance. On the one wall are three paintings of authoritarian figures – a judge, a priest and a professor. They seem like perfectly nice people until they step out of the wall and accuse Mads of being illicit, immoral and illiterate. They’re not necessarily wrong, but they seem to want to destroy us over it, which is not OK. Fight!

Of course, we are victorious, capitalizing on the vulnerability of the paintings themselves to weaken the figures, even though we ourselves are affected by the deep fear if this place. We pass out and reappear on the island, but Mads has managed to find a pocket watch that will allow us to reverse a small amount of time. We decide that our next stop will be the forest, again mostly because Milosh doesn’t think that it will be his nightmare.

We find ourselves at the end of a bridge spanning a deep ravine, with the sound of running water rising up to us from its unseen bottom. Again, fear washes over us and Mads and I are affected by it. In the middle of the bridge lies a huddled figure who turns out to be another Johanna, with tears running down her face and her wrists slit. The Johanna that we are with pushes her away and spits on her disdainfully. This is apparently the time just after she was fired from the university and before she was pulled into Ravenloft.

Mads verbally torments her for a little while, rubbing her weakness in her face, and then we continue across the bridge. However, we find that we can’t leave and that we gain wounds like Johanna’s in the process, so we turn around. Mads says some vaguely nice things, and I edit the note I left for her to make it clear that I would see her again some day (spending an icon point to edit her memory appropriately. The Johanna on the bridge recovers from her sadness and reveals herself to be the real Johanna! But the fake Johanna turns into a pair of demons and a bunch of little flaming guys!

We defeat the demons and return to the hub, and now we are all best friends with Johanna. Next up is my nightmare, which we assume is located in the ruined city.

Susanna invites us inside to discuss the situation. We explain ourselves in the most disturbing and convoluted way possible, while Susanna makes dinner for her sister. She is understandably skeptical about our story, and we can offer little in the way of proof. She doesn’t want to come with us without being sure AND we’re not sure whether a trip through Johanna’s portal will do any harm to a pregnant woman, so we will stay for now.

We have dinner and formulate a plan. Since this is the kind of situation where a heavily pregnant woman would certainly start to give birth at an inopportune moment, we tell Susanna to move Belinda to the root cellar for her protection. Our hope is that vampires will attack tonight and Susanna will witness them, making our story much more believable.

Sure enough, shortly after the sun goes down, there is the sound of wings flapping outside and a crashing noise coming from the second floor. We rush up to investigate, and run headlong into a group of man-bats pouring in through a hole in the roof thatching that they just created. Fight!

Fortunately, these things were not expecting us, and they are ill equipped to deal with three dangerous adventurers. They are very well equipped to be dead, however.

We rest for the evening (full heal up) and call Johanna in the morning for extraction. She is not excited about the baby we are bringing with us, but we (and she) don’t really have a choice. We are confident that arrangements will be made.

Johanna wants to discuss the next steps with us. She tells us that she would like to break her agreement with Lamoracanthus, the demon who has granted her some of her powers, and who is the source of the internal workings of the acidy awakened. According to their contract, she is obligated to continue providing bodies for the demon souls to possess, but since we have forbidden any more possessions, she hasn’t been doing so. He is probably getting mad, and might get uppity soon.

Her plan is to enter the demon’s realm of nightmares and fear through Mads’ dream abilities. We prepare ourselves with drugs in my torture room, and then join Mads on a featureless black plain in her mind. Mads brings us fully into his mind (giving Johanna a tail in the process), and then we set off to see what awaits us.

We are transported to the university, in the wake of Strahd’s attack. There are several bodies hanging from the lamp posts in the quad, as well as the bloody chunks from other unfortunate individuals. I spend a little time examining the area where Mads saw Strahd, as well as the hands of the people he killed, just in case there is some physical evidence that got left behind. Milosh goes into the building that holds Johanna’s office to see if there are any students left in the closet. Mads and his familiar see an odd raven who might not be a raven up on the roof of one of the buildings and try to have a conversation with it. No luck there, but he sends his familiar off to make contact.

Mads and Milosh end up in Johanna’s office, which is vacant of students. Mads does find the note he scrawled, however. Shortly thereafter, Mads hears sucking sounds coming from the hallway, and looking out does in fact see something that sucks. Zombies! Or something like zombies, at least. Fight! It becomes evident that at least one of these are the students that Mads thought he was saving.

We commit murder with our usual efficiency and continue our search for Dr Braun, whose office is just three doors down from Johanna’s. It has obviously been ransacked, but we manage to find a letter from Susanna’s sister Belinda requesting her help with some trouble, as well as a family portrait including the two of them. Evidently, the professor’s sister lives in the town of Cuzou, and we theorize that she may have fled down there to hide with family. That will be our next stop.

Upon leaving the university, we encounter a dark clothed man in the quad with a raven on his shoulder – Mads’ familiar! This is the raven that he was trailing, now shown to be a wereraven. He introduces himself as Bray, and happens to be the member of the Order of the Black Feather that Sasha told us about back in the day. He is carrying a wanted poster of the Synod detailing our crimes and promising punishment to those who aid us. He wants to talk, and tells us to meet him at the Blood on the Vine.

So we do. He is the bartender there, and sits down to talk with us for a while. Mads goes on a short trip to his witch head trees while we begin. The short version is that he offers allegiance to our cause as long as we are all fighting Strahd, which is not a problem. To start with, he will aid us by spreading misinformation about sightings of the scholar to keep Strahd guessing, and we will relay anything we learn from Sebastian about the Order to him. He is interested in meeting with the Scholar personally, but we don’t make any promises yet. In fact, we maintain the misconception that the scholar is a man, just in case. We also don’t tell him that the Oracle is a vampire, although he will find that out the next time he meets with Sasha and sees Liesl’s missing arm.

Finally we leave for Cuzou, traveling by foot through the forest. It is not difficult to find Belinda’s house, since we have an address. Milosh and I knock while Mads covers the back door. A woman soon answers – Belinda, it appears – and it is obvious that she is very pregnant. Susanna comes from the back to shuttle her back in the house. We break the bad news to her in the most brutal way possible – by telling her that everyone she knew from the university is dead, and that there are vampires hunting her right now. We will probably take her and her sister back to the Heimat. But first, maybe vampires will attack right now?

We fight against the sweaty mistress of labor and her minions, who appear to be children who have perished from their work here. They claw at us with their bony fingers and shield their foreman from our weapons. And then Milosh explodes them, and Mads explodes her.

We end up with about 20 children rescued from the sweat shop, and we pile them all into a cart and haul them off to Teufeldorf so that the church of Lathander can take care of them. Sasha isn’t completely down with our plan to dump children on him, but we give him some of the money that has been provided for the use of the synod to enhance the transaction.

We contact Johanna again and prepare for her to send us to the university to search for professor Braun. Johanna tells us that her forces have already found one of the other missing professors – Blaupunkt, and that he is even crazier than expected. She suggests that he be fed to Sebastian, since he isn’t much good for anything else.

We get some soldiers from the Heimat who will escort the girls to Point Hope, and we return to the Heimat. There, Mads goes and talks to his remaining raven(s?), and then to Sebastian. Sebastian is looking like his condition has not improved – he seems quite down, but at least he is doing his job of reporting his visions again. He tells Mads that one of his visions was of Milosh walking through the fog and not choking, and then being free from it. He also has dreamed of urban pickles, which sounds pretty tasty.

Mads gets the impression that Sebastian is fading and thinks that it might be time to think about breaking him out. Sometime.

We travel to Zeidenberg with Heinrich in tow, slapping our way through one of the local gangs on the way. He doesn’t remember in great detail what happened to the children, but he has vague ideas that we follow to an industrial dock area. It seems that the crypt vipers (the blue team) run this section of town. We approach a warehouse that Heinrich says looks familiar and speak with the man outside. We ask about the girls and he actually knows what we’re talking about.

Soon, we are talking to Ernesto, the big boys’ man. He ostensibly doesn’t recall the destination of the girls now, but he’s willing to look into it for us. In exchange, we are to find the source of a competing drug in the city, something injectable, and shut it down. The house of ill repute is the place to start.

We go there and indulge ourselves. In amongst Turkey legs and alaskan pipelines we learn that Angelique might have some available, possibly through her boyfriend. Mads gets into his room after his girlfriend leaves, steals his money, and finds a box of syringes with this new drug in it. The kid says he stole the drugs from a house west of town. He then tries to escape but gets kicked in the head.

The next day, we head out to this drug house, which is quite a distance outside of town. Inside is a gnomish alchemist who invites us in. He recognizes us as the synod, and has done work for Johanna (the specialist, actually) making all kinds of torture and hallucinogenic drugs. Lots of these were given to Sebastian, probably. He acknowledges that he was robbed and that this particular drug was part of what was taken, but also says that he isn’t making any more. We might be able to use his knowledge to work against the ravagers.

We return to Ernesto and inform him that we shut down his competitor, which turned out to be one kid thief with a limited supply of stolen merch. He really would like to know our source, but we refuse to turn in the gnome in case we need him again. He hands us an address in town to which he sent the girls.

The address turns out to be a sweatshop staffed by children, with a cat o nine tails wielding woman in charge. Mads finds the girls and tells them to be careful because knives may be flying soon. That sets off one of them, and her screams alerts the woman in charge who suddenly wants to fight something. Might as well be us!

Milosh and Mads start off at point hope after putting in an order to Johanazon for overnight delivery of a necromancer. They intercept Camille before she leaves for the evening, and Mads suggests that she terrorize Zeidenberg for her evening meal, because no one there is of any personal importance to him.

Back at the Heimat, Johanna informs me that the man who betrayed Ludmilla (Camille’s sister, from Sebes) to Strahd has been brought to the Heimat. I take him to my torture room and we talk for a while about Camille and her fears and weaknesses. Evidently, she is likely still sensitive to the fact that she was never as popular as her sisters, sensitive to the insults she endured as a child (being called ogre), and it will no doubt hurt to hear that her commanding officer is the one that caused the death of her sister and her own monstrous transformation. Having gathered traumatic horrors to destroy Camille’s will, I retire for the evening.

The next day, the necromancer from Johanna is ported in – a spirit by the name of Gregor stuffed in the body of Heinrich. He and Lucinda speak for a few minutes (she’s quite excited to have another monk to work with), and then Mads and Milosh take Gregor off to Kreszk to raise the spirit of the specialist. It takes several hours of Gregor squishing rotten body parts together before her spirit can be summoned, and then they spend some time tormenting her soul orb to get her to talk.

She reveals to them the three sets of command words (frenzy, sleep and suggest), and also tells them that she has 5 suggestions as to how to remove his vulnerability permanently – kill him, kill everyone who knows the words, deafen him, convince Johanna to remove the words or bring her back to life and let her resume her experiments, but with the goal of undoing her work. Milosh also demands that she reverse what she did with Abalescu, which she says she cannot.

None of these answers please the merciless overlords, so they destroy her soul orb and rebury the body. They hope to find a way to use Vistani curses to edit words before they reach Sebastian’s ears.

I meet the rest of the team in Point Hope, after leaving one of Sebastian’s cravats near Camille’s room. We discuss the possibility of using Gregor to retrieve his crazy children from whoever he sold them to in Zeidenberg (probably one of the gangs).

Camille comes out of her hole with the cravat and asks Mads where it came from, but nothing is revealed. They have a discussion of what could be done with Sebastian, what the specialist said in particular, and she is made even more not happy, between the terrible choices they were given and the fact that Mads won’t break Sebastian out right now.

That night, Camille visits me and is all cranky about the cravat, but I tell her to go away. Mads has a dream about vampires attacking the university in which he sees Strahd killing the staff trying to find out the identity of the scholar. He manages to get 4 names of potential suspects, which we now know. Mads saves some students hiding in Johanna’s office by leading them to the hidden room, then leaves instructions for them to go to Berez. After waking up, he rushes out of Point Hope to meet them, because surely they could have covered hundreds of miles on foot in the last hour without being eaten by wolves. Then he forgets where he told them to go, rides towards the wrong city, then realizes the error and abandons them entirely in his mind.

In the morning, we contact Johanna and explain the situation with the other professors. She tells us that one of them is dead and dumped in the lake, one is mindless and wandering in the woods outside of Barovia and one is missing entirely. We will gather them all up and hide them somehow to keep Strahd searching.

But first, off to Zeidenberg to find Heinrich’s children (enslaved by the gangs) and take them somewhere… better. Which is funny, really, because no place here is better than any other.

Through the portal, we can see Sebastian holding Johanna off of the floor. We dive through the portal and find Sebastian attacking Johanna, with Billie bleeding on the floor, two of Mad’s Ravens dead on the ground and the sound of a child screaming from upstairs. Fight!

Mads feeds Billie a healing potion while Milosh and I fight Sebastian, and Milosh manages to choke him out or something. Mads takes an unconscious Sebastian to his coffin and supervises some of Milosh’s men nailing the lid shut, Milosh goes upstairs and helps Liesl survive a torn-off arm and Florica deal with a vampire bite, and I help Johanna up from the floor. She is, unsurprisingly, not as injured as she appeared to be when we saw her through the portal.

Once everything is under control, we all go talk to Johanna. Her story is that Sebastian has been acting more and more erratically, and that he finally snapped. She reveals that she has made some preparations for the event, and that she has a strongroom (read, prison) partially prepared for him. Mads isn’t particularly fond of any of this, of course.

We go down to see her fully-operational, lightning-reinforced, triple-sealed anti vampire cage. It’s totally sweet. And even though there is a restraint table in there, we’re sure that Sebastian will be happy there. As happy as you can be in solitary confinement, at least.

Mads and Milosh stay behind to speak with Sebastian when he wakes up, and I go upstairs to talk with Liesl. I do my best to comfort her, and tell her that we are going to send her back to Teufeldorf. Before that, I remind her that Sebastian did this to her and that he is currently imprisoned, but that he would be very dangerous if he ever managed to escape. And then Johanna edits her memories to her advantage and portals the girl back to her home.

Mads and Milosh talk to Sebastian when he wakes up. He doesn’t remember much – just that he was playing with Liesl and Florica, got up to speak with someone in the hallway and then became angry – really angry. He doesn’t seem to remember much about the ordeal, and has to be reminded of who he killed. They reveal to him that they are only playing along so long as Johanna is the lesser threat.

We rest up and plan for our next move. But before we go, I go down to visit Sebastian. He’s hostile at first, and tries probing my mind while he questions me about whether I knew what was going to happen to him back in the asylum, but I burn my icon relationship to have my demons lash out against him and convince him both that I did not intend for him to be killed back then, and also that he really is a danger to the world who is best left caged. He believes it, which is sad for him.

Before I go, Sebastian has another vision. It’s an ambush in Lowenturm, evidently. Can’t wait until we’re there again.

We put Heinrich, who is still blathering as if we are going to let him go, into one of the cages in the garage building. The one without a hungry vampire in it, it course. He is very, very drunk, and doesn’t look like he is going to try to escape for some time.

Mads and I go into the workhouse to look at what the zombie workers were doing in there, and find that they were in the process of casting swords and other weapons. The weapons are not particularly fine, having been made by zombies with no artistic talent, but they seem to be made out of an unknown metal. It has a silvery glow to it, but is not pure silver. From an analysis of the foreman’s log and the inventory, we infer that the weapons are high nickel steel, which is resistant to corrosion.

Milosh goes into the main house to look around. The house is foul with dead bodies, probably the workers from the foundry or maybe hobos, and anything related to Casimir Drake himself has been defiled. There are some papers to and from Ulrich – brainstorming for spell names, letters back to Strahd requesting orders, musings about how the little girl might be important but no concrete information as to why.

Before we go to sleep we have a discussion about what to do with the gangs. Mads suggests that we release our vampires in the town to devour the gang members. I counter with the idea that Camille would be neither as selective nor as efficient as we would hope.

Then, sleep! And back to the Heimat with Heinrich in tow.

Once we get there, Johanna immediately sucks out Heinrich’s brain, and then explains what he knew. He seems to have dumped the girls off somewhere in Zeidenberg because he was a drunken fool – it was probably voluntary for both parties and not that he sold them. She tells us that he told Strahd about our identities (and Onyx would have confirmed much of this) and that he traced the trail of the scholar back to the university in Barovia city but no further.

We hunt down Florica and Liesl in the Heimat and find the little girl in a room playing with Sebastian, Liesl looking on.

I go down into the basement with Mads to look at the symbol that he has found

We have two options – track down the priest of Lathander (although it seems that the awakened already saved him) and take Florica to the Vistani along the way, or go to the university to get rid of incriminating evidence.

Fight! A thick mist rolls out of the crate, mostly white but tinged with red. Liesl looks contrite as she backs up against the wall, but that’s not really going to make much of a difference to us.

The mist beast is no match for us, and we disperse it handily. We then turn to Liesl. She has some kind of cockamamie story about how she went after a vampire den, but Sasha stood her up and she was captured. She had to work for the vampires doing so knows what, and she also had to sell out the priest of Lathander by telling his schedule to the vampires. Then she starts crying out of fear of us, which is rather justified. We question her about what’s going on here. Heinrich is here somewhere but she doesn’t know where, as well as “Onyx”, whoever that is. Many threats are exchanged, including us murdering Sasha in revenge for Liesl not washing the little girl’s face.

In one of the cages, there is a little Vistani girl and her father (who turns out to be dead). She evidently has the sight, because she knows that Milosh doesn’t need to travel, that Mads can walk in dreams, and that I hear demons. Two of the other cages contain feral vampires, one of which we dust.

We have a discussion about what to do with the two captives, and we finally settle on sending them both back to the Heimat and concealing the girl’s visions from Johanna, rather than either leaving them both behind or letting them flee on their own.

One they are gone, we decide to attack the work house by dropping a smoke bomb inside and fighting whoever comes out. What comes out is a group of zombie workers and their vampire foreman. We kill the zombies, but the foreman gets away and runs to the mansion to warn the others.

Worried that Heinrich might be making a break for it, we go to the back door of the mansion and jimmy it open. Inside is a disgusting kitchen, with rotten dripping bodies hanging from the ceiling. We can hear a voice from the front part of the house taunting us and then audibly wondering where we are. The voice sounds familiar… it’s Ulrich!

We make our way to the front and burst out onto the porch to stab Ulrich. Fight! His vampires make snacks of us but are eventually defeated and are all dusted.

A drunken Heinrich is the last survivor, so we collect him and loot the area for all its worth.

Before we start with the more important issues of the evening, we hire a passing merchant and his carriage to pick up the disadvantaged family from Schneideldorf’s house and take them to Lowenturm. This good and selfless act will surely absolve us from the horrible things that we might do in the future, and indeed, are planning on doing right now.

We arrive at the Drake foundry and look around. There are three buildings here – one is a workshop that probably contains the main furnaces and casting floors, one is an old house with boarded up windows and a large porch, and the last is a storage barn with light streaming out of a skylight in the roof and also visible under the main doors.

We decide to go in to the garage barn first, with Mads finessing open the skylight and Milosh pulling up one of the doors. Inside is a woman who appears to be a cook, tending a fire and maybe making oatmeal. There is also a metal crate of some kind, with the contents hidden, and a set of cages along the wall.

The woman turns around… and it’s Liesl, one of the vampire hunters from Teufeldorf and an associate of Sasha the cleric of Lightbro. We are initially kind of surprised and glad to see her, but she has other thoughts. She hits a panel of switch on the wall, whispers “I’m sorry” and then the crate begins to open.

Who knows what kind of horrors will be released. Other than us, that is, because we are not going to take this kind of betrayal well.

We spend some time at the Heimat. Milosh makes plans to send some of his soldiers off to the ravager campsites that the road wardens found to see if the orienteering code described by the tribe in the mountains applies to the ravagers as well.

While Johanna and I go off to engage in whatever, Milosh and Mads discuss what to do. They decide that, since Heinrich is a drunk, we should take some wine with us when we go look for him in Zeidenburg. Plan A at the moment is to try to turn him, plan B is to kidnap him and being him back to the Heimat for questioning and/or brain sucking, plan C is unknown and plan D is to kill him. Or maybe profit. Mads takes his minions (now there are 3, although one has a knife injury in his foot and the other has adoorophobia) in a quest into the basement to retrieve said wine and comes away with two bottles of red wine and one of white (in case Heinrich is a lady). Along the way, Mads wants to take Sebastian out of the Heimat and never bring him back.

Johanna and I talk about my supposed betrayal. She is upset that I read the demon book out from under her and didn’t even say goodbye when I left, but I counter by telling her that it was the book’s choice as to who got the power, and that immediately after the experience I had little control over what I did to other people (and it was usually terrible and violent). She seems to be somewhat comforted by that at least.

Mads breaks into Johanna’s room to make sure that he can and to check her defenses but doesn’t get into the heavy burglary yet. On the way out he finds a blue book with a calligraphic B on it lying on a table and takes it, but doesn’t read it yet.

The next day we plan to leave for Zeidenburg before dawn, but Sebastian doesn’t show up at the appointed hour. When Mads goes to look for him, he is lying unresponsive in his coffin. Mads assumes that Johanna did something to him, but we don’t come to an easy resolution and decide to deal with this later.

We get transported to the area near Zeidenburg and head north to the city. Along the way, we are accosted by a gang of men wearing red arm bandannas with skulls on them. They demand everything that we have, then just ask for our money, and then Milosh educates them in macroeconomic theory. They fail the course, so we’re forced to kill them.

We move on to the town, and find it in even worse shape than it was when we left it – buildings falling down, filth in the streets, the whole nine yards. We go to Schneideldorf’s house first to see what condition it’s in and find it filled with squatters and very little else. We ask a sickly mother there about the town in general, and she says that she doesn’t know anything about a dragon statue, that the mayor lives under the thumb of the bleeding skulls in a house down the street, and that the west side of town is the industrial zone. I tell her to wait here and that someone will come back for her.

Mads hands me the book from earlier and I check it out, finding it to be a journal of Sebastian’s, and I go to the last entry. It details Sebastian’s doubts about his remaining humanity, as well as a description of a hunting/murder chase that he had involving a terrified girl whom he killed for fun but didn’t even eat. We all read the entry, and if depresses Mads enough that he has to leave the house and go out into the street to murder his sadness away.

We go to the mayor’s house and punch our way through the gang members we find there, then question the mayor. It turns out that the two gangs vying for control of the town were pretty even until the last time we were here, and that we weakened the crypt vipers enough that the skulls could take over. The breakdown of duties is that the Skulls (run by a man named Lug) operate out of the Ill Repute (Schneideldorf’s favorite drinking/whoring establishment) and run the drug/prostitution/extortion part of the town. The other guys, run by Ernesto, handle murder, weapons and the hard stuff.

We momentarily forget that we’re actually in the city to retrieve Heinrich, and start to come up with a plan to either just murderdeath the gang leaders, or alternatively use their loved ones (Lug’s mistress Destiny or his awful children, Ernesto’s Iforgotwho) to anger the leaders into resuming their all-out gang war.

Up ahead in the mountains along the path we spot signs of a settlement, then observe the people in it for a while. They appear to be ravagers, but of a more primal and noble sort. They are dressed in furs rather than human flesh, are sitting around cook fires near crude tents and appear to have either women or young adults among their number. There is an obvious leader among them, standing in front of a more generously decorated tent that is watching over the other tribesmen. We decide to do two things at the same time – Milosh and I will try to talk to them and get on their good side while Mads steals from their tent.

The chief is remarkably receptive to Milosh and I when we come up the main path and ask to share their bounty. However, one of his people demand that we pass a series of trials before we sit at their fire. She names the trials mind, body and spirit, and that seems tailor made for the three of us. :-) I start with the trial of the mind, which involves taking a hallucinogenic drink and then trying to remember three women’s names. Milosh gets to fight in a gladiatorial snoo snoo battle with a gigantic bear woman named Fralka, and they go 10 rounds of axe and blade. Mads has to travel to a dragon cave and retrieve a pregnant statue without becoming pregnant himself.

We are all victorious! Much snoo snoo is had. That night, we celebrate with the tribesmen, who tell us about the smoke breathers, another tribe (?) who misuse the sacred vine and have generally been jerks. Milosh convinces them to help against the other ravagers, I get them to swear fealty to the synod (sort of, anyway). We also get a recipe for and a sample of some kind of milk that the tribe uses to release themselves from the effects of the virrid. We don’t ask them exactly what (or who) they extract the milk from.

Once we are done, we leave for point hope, passing through the ruined inn north of Berez and Kreszk first. In Kreszk we examine the progress that the town has made since the vampires were killed, and find lingering signs of Casimir’s promotion of us there. Mads is disturbed by the innkeeper’s deference to us.

Then we go to Point Hope. Milosh wants to check on Abalescu and try giving him the milk to see if it makes a difference. He meets Lucinda there and she mentions that she could probably make a serum to improve the soldiers here out of Abalescu juice, but that it would probably lead to the death of Abalescu. It’s not as bad because Abalescu has already asked to die, but Milosh wants to hold off and try giving him the milk instead so that everyone can be weak. Mads talks to Camille and she continues to complain about everything.

We then return to the Heimat to talk to our sponsor again. I start to tell her about the remaining proto ravager tribe, but Milosh kicks me before I can. Johanna brings out Sebastian and he starts having a vision of Heinrich near a dragon statue with outstretched wings. It doesn’t go far enough for Johanna, and she… encourages more from him somehow (something about a building with green shutters), which appears to cause Sebastian pain. Milosh interrupts her before she can go a third round.

Mads escorts Sebastian back to his room to recover (and not be chained up by Johanna).

There are some corpses on the wall that look to be test subjects that died of exposure. There is no sign that they suffered any trauma, nor have they been turned into either ravagers or awakened. There are notes on a chalkboard on the other side of the room that confirm that the Awakened were interested in the old tribes that used to inhabit the area. The notes say that the roots and vines they consumed granted them a type of proto-rage, as well as unnaturally long life. Maybe they are still alive? Maybe they are the ravagers that the road wardens fought originally, and the more recent ravagers are the products of the Awakened?

Mads and Milosh go down one of the side passages, getting hit again by the madness pressing in on them, and reach a large chamber with a pool in the center of it. It is surrounded by large stone blocks, some of which have body parts on them. The ceiling and walls have unusually green vines climbing across them. The watery substance in the middle of the chamber starts to ripple, and a transparent oozing creature emerges. Fight! And win!

During the battle, I was thrown through a door into a back office of the compound, inside of which is more information about the ragestone. It has a recipe for the material, which is composed of starch, the vines that we saw in the jello room (virrid) and ash bark. It probably also requires the interference of an outer being or god-like thing to activate.

We move on to another hallway to investigate and find the remnants of a portal lingering on a pedestal. The exit from this room is obscured by curtains. Milosh tries to go through the curtains, but he goes momentarily insane, gets confused, and returns to stare at an imaginary world in the other side of the portal fragment. Mads and I manage to break him out of it before anything unfortunate happens.

Milosh cuts down the curtains, and we go into the next room, which looks to be an animal storage room. The animals have gone bad and merged into horrifying chaos monsters that now attack us. Fight!

After we fight them off, we bandage ourselves and move further. The next room holds a sphere similar to the monastery that held the monks of the sphere, and this one contains the spirit of the doctor from the asylum. He asks us to give him a body so that he can return to the scholar and “help” us in some way. Milosh wants nothing to do with him because he is part of the reason why we committed so much murder at the asylum. We end up leaving him behind to stew rather than risk him taking over our minds or something equally horrible.

We decide that our next immediate step will be to go to the very top of the mountain and see if there’s anything left of the original barbarian tribe of the mountain.

We continue our training sessions with our minions. Billie will start to build the Ravens for Mads. Johanna teaches me a safe word to stop Sebastian if he gets out of control. Milosh teaches his recruits how to fight brutally. Before bed, I take an astrolabe and hourglass and try to chart the movement of the stars to determine our location. Mads attempts the same by talking to them, then runs recon on Joanna’s room in case he wants to break in there later.

The next day, we take Gia and get portaled back to the Vistani camp. Marya and the other Vistani are overjoyed to see her, and she gets them and sings the praises of the Synod and the Awakened. Hooray, we have new allies! Mads isn’t excited that Gia is talking about the Awakened, since he wanted the Vistani to be strictly loyal to us, but whatever, it is what it is.

We travel on to Point Hope. Mads wants to visit the cave that we left Sebastian and Camille in, but he doesn’t realize that I took Sebastian back to the Heimat. At Point Hope, Mads and Camille conspire against the Awakened and myself – she misses her new boyfriend and wants to whine about it. She’s not happy about me taking Sebastian back to Johanna.

Continuing onward, we reach the foothills of Mount Baratak about the same time that a snow storm begins there. Up ahead of us on the path we can hear what sounds like a frightened man getting a beating, and as we approach it looks like some large men(?) applying the beating. Milosh charges in to investigate with his weapon and confirms his suspicions. Ravagers! We engage!

We polish off the creatures and help the beaten man to his feet. He introduces himself as Otto, a scavenger traveling the pass who was looking for abandoned gear before being attacked and beaten by Ravagers. He tells us that there are caves further up the pass that we can take shelter in for the night, and that he was trying to get to an old building he spotted on one of his earlier journeys. Milosh helps him to repair his gear during the night, and in exchange he shares his provisions with us.

The next morning, we send the old man on his way and search for this building that he mentioned. It is not hard to find, and turns out to be an awakened research cell inside the mountain itself. There are notes, lab tables, a few dead bodies, symbolic symbol carvings etc. There is something wrong about this place that all of us feel, and it seems as if something alien has been using this area as a gateway into our world.

We all discuss the situation and come up with the following plan. Sebastian and Camille will travel to the Vistani camp in the night and wait in the woods. When Gia comes out of her wagon to pee in the middle of the night, Sebastian will jump her and try to bite her, possibly name dropping Strahd in the process. At the same time, Camille will attack the camp. We hope that this will either change Gia’s mind about Strahd, or convince Marya to ignore her concerns about the vampires. We will follow the next day and use the situation to continue our pressure on her to join us.

When we arrive at the camp, we find the Vistani in an uproar. It seems that 2 men were killed last night in the woods, and the camp wants to form a posse to search for the ones who did it. Once Marya had calmed the people a little, we head inside to talk. She says that the two men were caravan guards, but they were off duty at the time. They were found this morning by some of the other guards.

Marya leads us out to the site of the attack and we investigate. There are signs of a battle here, with 5 combatants. Mads finds an arrow with runes of protection from undead on them, as well as a hole in the ground, probably left by a stake, surrounded by black ichor. There is no ash, though, so it doesn’t appear as if one of the vampires is dead. Marya receives a report from one of her men that Gia is missing. We tell her that we will find Gia and Milosh and Mads go off to track whoever escaped from this battle.

They come to a cave with black ichor splashed on the rocks, and inside are Camille (in full vampire mode), an unconscious Gia, and a very injured Sebastian. Camille tells them the tale – Gia has the sight, and saw the attack coming. She had two archers up in the trees that opened fire on Sebastian when he appeared and weakened him, then Gia staked him to the ground. Camille managed to knock out Gia and kill the two guards violently, and then drag them here.

She also tells them that Sebastian’s disguise failed him once he was staked, and that Gia knows it was him. Presumably, that would incriminate us as well. Milosh takes Gia out of the cave while Mads allows Sebastian to feed on him and regain his strength.

We discuss our options. Since Gia knows that Sebastian attacked her and is connected to us she is unlikely to convert to our cause (possibly if we give her Sebastian). Camille suggests that we turn her into a vampire to remove her credibility. Sebastian suggests we let Johanna alter her memories to forget that Sebastian was involved. We chose the last option, and Mads and I take her back to the Heimat through a portal while Milosh returns to Marya to remind her of the danger of Strahd and to tell her that Gia is OK and under our medical care.

Once we get to our base, Mads passes out from blood loss and I verify that he is letting Sebastian feed on him. Johanna and I take Gia to my chamber for reprogramming. Milosh returns after his talk.

We end the session in our rooms, Milosh training his recruits, Mads instructing Billie in the art of evasion, and me studying Gia to see if there is any physical manifestation of the sight.

We start off in the briefing room of the Heimat, where we have been promised gifts. Johanna tells us of the ring of erudition, which is what she has been using to drain the minds of her victims, and she reveals to us that the minds trapped in the sphere that we freed were a group of ancient scholars. She now has the power to place the minds of these dead scholars into the empty shells of those she drained. Win! This is apparently what is now inhabiting that loremaster lady that we have been running into.

These scholars had gone into psychic hibernation until the spirit of knowledge had entered the land, which the awakened qualify as. They will be able to serve as a research force for the awakened/us.

Then she leads us out to the side of the building, to present us with the gifts that she mentioned earlier. The gifts are evidently facility upgrades, with Milosh getting a training yard, Mads getting apprentice spies (the first is is a girl named Billie), and me getting an interrogation chamber with a restraint chair and “implements”. The room also includes the book that gave me the Vox Umbra, although its pages are all blank at the moment. Sebastian gets a crypt to sleep in, a very nice crypt, with a marble coffin and padded with rich fabrics.

We can now spend time in our themed chambers to receive a buff – sending a spy to the map or receiving 2 d6 boosts to defense for Mads, extracting info from a prisoner or getting a d20 reroll for me. Milosh gets.. something else that will be revealed next week. We all get our own rooms, and there is a library on the second floor to do our own research.

Johanna takes Mads, Sebastian and I aside to speak with us about Gia, the granddaughter of Rounie Marya, telling us the she is going to convince the Raunie to ignore our advice and maintain faith with Strahd instead (Sebastian had seen it). This will likely lead to the deaths of whichever Vistani spill the beans about us, as well as revealing information about us. Joanna’s suggestion is that she could be eliminated, which would be the most expedient way of avoiding the deaths. Mads suggests that rather than do that, we might be able to just directly scare Gia and gain the same effect, perhaps by having Sebastian disguise himself as a different vampire, or perhaps by using Camille to do it. I suggest that Gia could be knocked unconscious during the attack, which would encourage the Raunie to mistrust Strahd and keep her granddaughter out of the equation.

We travel to point hope to discuss the matter with Milosh before we do anything concrete (outside the reach of Johanna). Lucinda is there, but we now know that she is now wholly inhabited by one of these sphere monks that we’ve heard of and is therefore not at all Lucinda anymore.. She’s doing as well as can be, but we have been told that she has “strengthened” Point Hope. We have yet to see what that means.

Sebastian and Camille meet for the first time, and they seem to get along very well. Possibly a little too well – it seems as if both of them need to commiserate about being unwilling vampires. This can only lead to betrayal, obviously.

The last thing that we do is take Milosh aside to tell him what we have learned about Gia and the Vistani, and what we think that we should do about that.

We rest in the camp, with Gia (Marya’s daughter) providing us with a place to rest and a promise of breakfast in the morning. It is delightful.

After breakfast, we go to speak to the Raunie, and we explain to her that this attack on her people was sanctioned by Strahd himself, through this “Onyx” individual who is presumably the replacement for Blackburn. Milosh is very careful to not mention the awakened to her during his explanation of how we discovered the impending attack, although we do eventually speak about it couched in statements about allies of necessity. The Raunie’s granddaughter, Gia, is very angry about the whole deal, first because we are directly involved with one or more vampires and second because one of those vampires is Sebastian, a man with the sight, who she is convinced will destroy the Vistani. Marya says that she cannot make a quick decision and must consult her fortune telling. Milosh stalks out because she won’t commit and Gia leaves because Marya won’t refuse.

After one last conversation between Milosh and one of his cousins (Milosh seems to be telling him to be subversive and convince others to convince the Vistani to back us) we depart for Lowenturm, where Camille awaits us in our room at the Inn.

I meet up with the iron rook on the outskirts of town, where he introduces himself as Percival (I tell him that my name is Jurgen Crotchnow), and he also reveals that he and his allies are vampires. We are not particularly surprised, since they are working for Strahd, but I do have to deal with this chump being all annoyed that I can’t follow him through the woods at his preferred speed.

We all reach the camp and find 2 other men waiting for us there to start the attack, circle the bedrolls and jump in. And then the synod springs their ambush! We almost immediately find out that Ludmilla, the girl that we stole for Strahd, is one of the vampire troopers.

We destroy the vampires but leave Ludmilla, or Camille, or whoever she is, alive. She is now free, since one of the other vampires was her sire, and she is hoping that we can help her by providing asylum. We agree to do so, although there is some disagreement as to whether we are going to reveal her existence to the scholar and the awakened, or whether we will just keep her existence to ourselves.

She tells us that Tatiana is part of a different cell of the iron rooks, and that she is planning on staging an attack on another nearby Vistani camp at dawn. Fortunately, the item that Mads stole from Tatiana is a compass that points to nearby Vistani, and we follow it to the target location. It happens to be the same camp that we had taken Sebastian to (and who had recommended that we have him killed), and we speak briefly with Rouney Marya, who seems disappointed with our new outfits.

We plan to repel the attack and have the Vistani jump out at an opportune time. Then, the attack! A group of spectral wolves come tearing across the meadow at the camp, and we move to stop them. Fight!

We win! Tatiana and her minions are no match for us, although it is close there for a second. Now, to speak with the Rouney about allying themselves with the awakened.

We make ready to return to the town of Lowenturm to find the perpetrator of this foul deed, but first we decide to do some marketing with Luke. Being a werewolf (or related creature), it seems like he shouldn’t like the vampires, but he’s kind of ambivalent about the whole deal. We give him our business cards and play our theme songs, and then move on, leaving him with the name of the synod and an opportunity to contact us in the future.

On the road back to town, we pass a bush that snarls at us hungrily, and then a pack of spectral wolves bursts out and starts chasing us. We flee down the path to a bridge crossing over a narrow river before they catch up to us. Fight!

The wolves prove little challenge to us, and after they are dispatched I follow their magical trail back through the woods. In a pile of leaves near where they burst out of, we find a pair of bodies – the guards from the caravan. There are signs that the cause of death was electrocution, which explains the scorch marks in the camp attack. Having nothing else to gain from here, we move in to the town.

The hospitality stand in the town is empty at the moment, so we move directly to the tower at the center of town, which also happens to be their city hall. We accost the clerk at the front desk and convince him to fetch the mayor for us. She is not compact, not does she have long dark hair, so she can’t be the culprit. However, during the course of the discussion, the clerk does spill the beans about a potion merchant named Tatiana that matches the description. We threaten them, in series, with the possibility that we are part of the iron rook or that we kill members of the iron rook, and they agree to stay in the tower for now so that they don’t interfere with our plans.

We go to the market and find the potion merchant. She matches the description that we were given, so we talk to her. She seems innocent enough, and her selection of potions is unimpressive, not seeming to be the kind of thing we would expect a decent wizard to be selling. There is a creepy dumb guy watching her closely that she introduces as Gurt, the slow guy who carries her stuff. It turns out that she is half Vistani, and a conversation with Milosh reveals that she harbors some bitterness towards them over them kicking out her and her mother. Mads makes a contribution by picking her pocket and retrieves a small object, although he doesn’t get a chance to look at it yet.

At one point, Gurt is sent off to her room in the Lions Mane Inn to fetch her shawl and I follow, giving him some relationship advice when he emerges from the room. I then go in myself to look around, finding a small lightning rod, such that a wizard might use in casting a lightning bolt, as well as an iron rook badge. Oh no! After I leave the inn, I end up being tailed by another agent who I confront. They are here on behalf of Onyx, who is presumably a lieutenant in the iron rooks. I convince him that I am here with another lieutenant (Obsidian) and that I need his help in killing Milosh. We agree to meet south of town to kill them (us) at their (our) camp.

Tatiana finally closes up shop and goes off to do some chores with Gurt, and Mads and Milosh go back to the inn to rest. I leave a pie containing a message about the attack on their table, which Mads eventually eats. They head South to set up an ambush spot, while I join my new frenemies.

During the night, we have our own sleepy time hijinks. Milosh dreams of the matriarch of the Vistani camp that we had gone to earlier (by the name of Rouney Marya). She tells him that he must bring down the devil by lying with the demon, and then a dark shadow rises up behind her, and he wakes up horrified.

I wake up with Johanna looking at herself in the mirror and she’s actually looks genuinely happy. She expresses that she is glad that she doesn’t have to go it alone anymore. Then we go at it together.

Mads wakes up on a rooftop, even though he had passed out in the alley where Sebastian fed on him. He had a nice note from Sebastian clutched in his whatever that thanks him for being a friend, expresses distrust for Urban, and says not to tell anyone about him trying to eat someone and for the people he will eat in the future. Made scratches out that part and leaves all the nice things about himself, then steals breakfast from a wealthy house.

We return to the university to be on our way. Johanna gives us the opportunity to rebrand ourselves, but we’re pretty happy with our names. Milosh does become the Champion rather than the bodyguard, since our bodies do a good job of guarding themselves. She tells us that her people are aware of a skirmish in the Forlornwald that surely must have been perpetrated by Strahd’s people, if not Strahd himself. And then she creates a portal to take us there. Milosh takes his armor off in case she has enchanted it to deceive us, but it all appears to be real.

Mads ascends into the trees to look around and sees the town of Lowenturm in the distance. We head there, in the hope that someone there has heard of an attack on the Vistani in the area. The hospitality coordinator of the town gets us and wants to give us a tour, but we refuse. She does tell us that a caravan came through here a few days ago and departed to the south, which would seem to be the one that we’re looking for. After helping her with the tourism slogans of the town, we leave to follow the caravan.

The trail of the wagons splits off of the main trail towards an ambush location and we follow. A clearing up ahead has 3 wagons that have been attacked, with the people murdered and bloody (about a dozen overall). We go to work.

It appears that this is the same caravan that passed through the town, as it bears the name of the magician guy that the hospitality lady from the town described. A quick autopsy shows that the people here died of blood loss from what appears to be a mammalian attacker with dark hair, but there was no obvious sign of feeding. Tracks in the area look canine, but they do not appear to have left the area. We decide that werewolves are the culprits, but it is not obvious where they have gone since the tracks do not exit the campsite.

There are a few areas that are burnt as if by fire, and I determine that there are two distinct types of marks, one of which appears to be from a summoning spell and the other which appears to be from a stroke of lightning or another kind of electricity. None of the Vistani here appear to be able to cast spells, nor do any of the bodies have marks of electricity in them, so there isn’t an obvious explanation.

At that moment, Milosh hears the sound of a Vistani dirge coming from the woods somewhere to the north. Fortunately, he is a master at the concertina, and he joins in with harmony to try to me the player into the clearing. And he succeeds! The player is a man, or appears to be at least, but instead he admits to being a wolfwere. He says that he knows who did this evil deed, but he won’t tell us unless we evict some people from his forest. Sounds good to us.

The people to be evicted turn out to be a family from another world who are disturbingly innocent. They recently arrived here through the mists and have set up a logging and fur trapping operation and just want to be left alone. After a good amount of convincing and a fair amount of vague threats, we get the family to agree to move to the outskirts of Lowenturm. We also eat some delicious biscuits. Finally, they are out and we return to Luke.

He tells us that it was a woman who committed these murders, and was capable of summoning spectral wolves to kill the Vistani. She is described as having long dark hair and being small and compact, with an herbal smell about her. She departed to the north, returning to the town where I can only guess she is the mayor. Her goal appears to have been to not only kill the gypsies, but also to frame the wolfweres for the job. We tell Luke that it was probably vampires, since they don’t really get along. And then we head off to the town to find the culprit.